The Age of Empathy, and Selfish Genes

I had suggested that this be the core book for our October meeting, while encouraging people to read other books on altruism/cooperation as well.

I have started to read The Age of Empathy, and am not finding it that enlightening.

For one, he rails against Social Darwinism quite a bit--wasn't Social Darwinsim discredited in the early 1900's? Definition from Wikipedia:

Social Darwinism is a pejorative term used for various late nineteenth century ideologies which, while often contradictory, exploited ideas of survival of the fittest. More from the Wikipedia article

Sadly, "survival of the fittest" is what some lay people (and some scholars in the social sciences) still think of when they think of Darwin. I read today that Darwin did use the term, but that Herbert Spencer came up with it before Darwin published On the Origin of the Species. It is an unfortunate phrase, as it makes people think that Darwin is saying that life is all about competing, and that only the physically strongest and most aggressive survive. "Fit" refers to fit to survive and leave offspring in the environment the organism finds itself--it could be brute strength that is called for, but it could mean so many other things, such as having a nose that can filter cold air if you find yourself living in Ice Age Europe.

As we read in Genome, humans who tended to live in monogamous pairs were more fit at some point in our history: Men hunted; high-quality protein was necessary for our larger brains; women gave birth to premature infants because of head size; men helped care for the infants and provided meat; women did not need to go out and hunt, so could stay with the young child while digging roots and tubers, which were a more reliable source of steady calories when no meat was killed. The pairs who lived that way tended to leave more offspring at that point in human history. So, "fit" in this case means cooperating in a monogamous pair.

One thing I didn't know was that Enron's "CEO, Jeff Skilling ... was a great fan of Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, and deliberately tried to mimic nature by instigating cutthroat competition within his company." (p. 39) This seems to be a misunderstanding of what I think Dawkins was saying (it's been a long time since I read the book). Genes are selfish--in that a gene's ultimate purpose is to get itself reproduced--but that doesn't always mean that the organism they find themselves in is necessarily selfish. (Well, I believe that organisms are ultimately selfish; that's what our discussion of altruism in evolution is all about.) But even though the ultimate aim is for the organism to reproduce itself, the proximal aim could be to do so by showing generosity to the rest of one's group in the hope that they will reciprocate with more altruism. So the selfish gene theory doesn't rule out altruism and cooperation. Apparently de Waal and Dawkins have had disagreements about the meaning of the "selfish gene." (p. 40)

I keep waiting to get to an examination of primate cooperation, but so far (p. 43), the book rambles with anecdotes. And de Waal seems more interested in making political statements than sticking to biology. He starts out in the first paragraph of the preface with politics:

Greed is out, empathy is in.

The global financial crisis of 2008, together with the election of a new American president, has produced a seismic shift in society. Many have felt as if they were waking up from a bad dream about a big casino where the people's money had been gambled away, enriching a happy few without the slightest worry about the rest of us. This nightmare was set in motion a quarter of a century earlier by Reagan-Thatcher trickle-down economics and the soothing reassurance that markets are wonderful at self-regulation. No one believes that anymore.

Can't I just read about primate behavior?

I will finish this book--it is a quick read, since it doesn't go into much depth. Then I'm going to read one of the others on the list to discuss at the October meeting (see sidebar).

Here's a review that had some criticisms of The Age of Empathy that I agree with. For example,

This is a wonderful book to dip into, but a frustrating one to read from start to finish, since it is hard to discern a clear organizing principle for the chapters. After reading a few pages, one tends to run out of momentum, because themes seem to repeat.